Recession-Stung Weekly Stings Staffers;
Publisher Brewster Waxes Journalistic

In January, publisher David Brewster laid off three people, cut back the hours of two mainstay staff writers and cancelled the contracts of two other reporters.

And, what's worse, sources inside the Weekly tell us that the publication may have to resort to free distribution if its aggressive subscription campaign - 25 cents an issue for a year's worth - doesn't help it rebound from a significant drop in advertising revenue.

As one of the country's few non-free newsweeklies, the Weekly gets an unusually large chunk of its revenues from subscriptions and newsstand sales. But its 75-cent sticker-price keeps thousands of people from picking it up, therefore making it tougher for Weekly ad reps to persuade businesses to buy space in the paper. Becoming a freebie conceivably would demolish the last palpable barrier between an advertiser and a would-be reader.

Brewster acknowledged to us that the Weekly is "adjusting to a slower growth rate than expected." In a somewhat confusing denial, Brewster said that the notion of going to a freebie currently is not on the table, but that he was not "deadset against" the idea, and that he and other managers talk about it once in a while.

Regardless, the Weekly's thinning staff size and page count, along with its bargain-basement subscription blitz, spell trouble for Seattle's most popular "alternative" publication. One has to wonder whether it's reexam-

ination time for the 18-year-old paper, where even people on the inside admit that its temples are starting to gray.

A publication with high commercial appeal, the Weekly's success ebbs and flows with its advertising. Small- and medium-sized businesses, historically the Weekly's old faithfuls, are continuing to cut back on their advertising as the recession festers in the Northwest. "The real battle we're having," Brewster said, "is over meat-and-potatoes advertisers - the medium-sized businesses. Retail here is about the worst of any city in the country."

The drop-off has forced the Weekly , as they say in board rooms, to "restructure personnel" - trimming its team of 10 staff writers to eight, slashing hours and ripping up contracts. Unfortunately for editorial staffers, they often are the first to go when the money tightens. (After all, you wouldn't fire ad reps when you need to sell more ads.)

Axed outright was leisure/retail staff writer Rose Pike, who had been with the Weekly for more than 10 years, having risen from the rank of editorial assistant. Music staff writer Douglas McLennan and food writer Schuyler Ingle had their contracts cancelled, though Brewster said McLennan actually is writing more stories now that he's a freelancer - that is, getting paid per story.

Staff writers Mary Bruno and Paul Roberts both had their hours slashed to 20 a week - Bruno from 32, and Roberts from 40. Also laid off were part-time copy editor and occasional book reviewer Sally Anderson and an advertising support-services worker.

"Our central staff is really producing more material than we've got pages for. We were having to hold articles," Brewster explained. "I don't mean to say, though, that the reason (for the personnel moves) wasn't disappointing ad sales."

Ingle, an author and former writer for the Los Angeles Times, said that despite being "destitute," he was not bitter about losing his job. Having been through the Weekly's revolving door once before, in the early 80s, Ingle said he maintained realistic expectations during his second stint there. He was, however, critical of Brewster's personal management practices.

Brewster: "When people say 'Why aren't you more like the Village Voice? I say, 'Should I ask the Village Voice why they're not more like the Weekly?'"

"All this David Brewster stuff about being one big happy family is a bunch of hogwash, " Ingle said. "It's one of the most dysfunctional families in the Northwest.

"He tends to wait until you have your first baby or get a mortgage and then he fires you. He has a great style," he said. "Brewster talks about this 'one big happy family' thing and then someone like Rose gets fired after 11 years, and after being told she was such a wonderful person doing wonderful things. That's the style of the Weekly."

Ingle said that, in part because of Brewster's attempts to manufacture camaraderie, Weekly employees get lulled into a false sense of job security.

"People working there maintain a remarkable level of naivete. If anything, maybe Rose (getting fired) will be the big signal to people working there."

Pike declined our invitation for an interview, and attempts to reach McLennan were unsuccessful.

The cutbacks come as the ad-dollar pot, in a town heretofore known for its generous advertisers, has begun to dry up, and with it, possibly the Weekly's giddy adolescence. While the Weekly's advertising content is hovering at a healthy 63 percent, fewer ads mean fewer pages. From the glory days of the 90-to-100-page editions, the Weekly in recent months has thinned to 70 to 80 pages, with some issues dipping into the 60s.

Brewster said the Weekly's main competition for ad dollars are radio stations and newspapers, which he said have parlayed special sections on such things as weddings and neighborhood news into advertising successes.

"What the dailies are doing is becoming a collection of niche publications. They are able to compete better against niche markets like ours."

Brewster said that tough economic times also bring out more of the wheeler-and-dealer in ad reps. "In a competitive market, ad rates get very rubbery."

To help combat these realities, the Weekly - which gets a surprising two-thirds of its circulation from home delivery - has begun a newspaper-style subscription promotion, which Brewster hopes will lift the paper's circulation from its current 34,000 a week to 40,000 by the end of the year. He said the campaign was "going very well," and that circulation was "rising dramatically."

Weekly sources, who asked not to be named, told us that the promotion is a last-ditch effort to avoid having to shift to free distribution. Brewster said the sources were wrong ... sort of.

"There is nothing like that going on. The fact that we have a free paper on the Eastside (Eastside Week ) invariably has people raising the question of us going free in Seattle. We are enjoying success with the Weekly , so there is no reason to think that we would change anything," Brewster said, adding, "Though I am not deadset against Eastside Week becoming a pay paper or the Weekly becoming a free paper. We occasionally have those conversations."

Though the recession is an easy scapegoat for publishers, it is no secret - even to Brewster - that many Seattle readers have grown discontented with what they perceive to be the Weekly's mainstream approach of covering local news. The topic got Brewster speaking freely about what he sees as the Weekly's place in Seattle's print media community.

"Most free circulation papers tend to go more in the direction of eye-opening stories, in the "holy shit" direction," he said. "I see it in a different way. The Weekly certainly sets itself against conventional reporting, but it is not an ideological paper. It is not a "Things are really terrible" paper.

"My models are more like the New Republic , the Atlantic , and the New Yorker. To me there is a higher calling than melodramatic reporting. If you're going to be predictably left wing, you'll just preaching to the converted," he said. "We have reporters who can out-think rather than out-scoop the competition. I like complexity rather than black-and-white reporting. Our reporters are hired to go in that direction.

"I never want to say that the way the Weekly does it is the way it should be done. But when people say 'Why aren't you more like the Village Voice ?' I say, 'Should I ask the Village Voice why they're not more like the Weekly ?'"

Brewster, getting to the heart of the matter, then talked about his editorial philosophy in the context of reader perception and commercial viability in a town he believes is too small and too consensus-minded for his publication to take on a more daring, in-your-face ethos.

"Seattle has a culture of centrism, and I am an explorer of common ground," he said. "In big cities like Los Angeles, New York and Chicago, it's easier for publications to form into camps and still have a lot of readers. But if publications divide up that way here, you're not going to get a lot of advertisers. You'll have things to write about, but they're only going to make yourself feel good. Our paper needs credibility."

Brewster called Seattle a "middle-class, well-educated bourgeois town" that, ironically, he wishes had a "more vital" political environment. He also said he welcomed the recent proliferation of small-budget freebies and the cracking open of historically stodgy dailies.

"The (Bellevue) Journal-American is running personal ads now," he said. "Journalism is in an interesting, fertile, fluid period. I'm glad to see a lot of stuff being tried."

Times Editorial Page Turns Right into Carlson

KIRO News: Still Boxed In

[Home] [This Issue's Directory] [WFP Index] [WFP Back Issues] [E-Mail WFP]

---

Contents on this page were published in the April, 1993 edition of the Washington Free Press.
WFP, 1463 E. Republican #178, Seattle, WA -USA, 98112. -- WAfreepress@gmail.com
Copyright © 1993 WFP Collective, Inc.